It is not always easy to describe the path one took to get from A to B, in this case astronomy and astrophotography.
When I was around 7 years old my father brought home a small reflector telescope from Sears. It was some type of Newtonian. The telescope was on a small tripod and could be moved around manually. There was a single built in eye piece.
With some difficulty I lined up on the moon, the mechanism on the tripod was not the most fluid or precise. I remember being completely stunned and excited as I could see the craters on the moon. The moon disappeared fairly quickly in the field of view until I realized I was going to have to keep moving the telescope to follow the effect of the earth’s rotation.
The experience sparked my interest in astronomy and over the next few years I read everything I could on the subject (within the limits of what I could take on board at that age). I also was able to see Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. I was hooked.
Time progressed and school and other activities interfered with the pursuit of visual astronomy. In other words I developed other interests.
Some time in the late 1970’s while living in Jakarta, Indonesia I acquired an 8 inch celestron telescope and started doing visual observations again. I enjoyed viewing different areas of the moon and trying to identify details on Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Celestron had several eye pieces which made this process easier.
In the early 90’s I had relocated to Singapore and upgraded to an 11 inch SCT. I continued to view the solar system, and started to try and see some nebulae and distant galaxies, but they were quite fuzzy and Singapore is a heavily light polluted environment.
Work interfered and a hiatus from astronomy ensued until 2009.
In 2009 now back in Thailand I decided to get involved in Astrophotography. The field had developed and there was a lot of sophisticated equipment that allowed for some stunning images. Of course what I didn’t know about equipment, operating requirements and processing could have filled a book.
I initially purchased a Meade 16 inch with a field derotator and a color camera. I didn’t really know much about types of mounts, and from the little I knew about GEM mounts I thought they would be difficult. I also didn’t understand much about guiding. As you may have guessed the Meade field derotator was a bit clunky and the Meade mount had some hard limits to how well it would track over time, so my initial attempts at imaging were limited to rather short exposures and I often reverted to visual observations.
Nevertheless the excitement of getting an image of objects such as the Orion Nebula seemed pretty amazing to me. I also imaged a couple of galaxies. I shudder when I look at the images today, but at the time I marveled at what I had been able to capture.
As I learned more I installed a CDK 20 on an ME II mount, I initially had a color camera, but ultimately moved to a mono camera with filter wheel and a guide scope. The guide scope proved challenging and I learned about the issue of differential flexure and why a guide scope on a long focal length telescope was not a good idea.
Being located in Thailand, there really is no local club where you can consult others, so in a bit of a vacuum I slowly developed the technical skills to install, maintain and operate the system. A friend of mine Stefan Schmidt joined me in this endeavor, and I could not have completed the installations without him.
Thailand was however a good location for astrophotography, being at latitude 13 degrees north I could image many of the southern targets as well as northern targets.
From this point the real climb up the hill began. As I learned more about the technical and operational aspects of the system, I also installed several other systems. The CDK 20 gave way to a RiLA 600 on a polar fork, and a 4 telescope wide field array was also installed on a polar fork. The array consisted of four 300 mm F/3 Riccardi Honders scopes. Leo Orazi who made the excellent Voyager control program helped make a version to control the array. For medium field I installed a RiFAST 400 which was a 400 mm F/3.8 scope that from a construction point of view proved to be a disaster that really never worked right.
Things moved along pretty well and then the curtain began to come down. When I had initially started in 2009 my site which was also my weekend home was in a Bottle 3/4 zone around 70 km from Bangkok. No story ever ends with a perfectly happy ending. By 2018 civilization was encroaching on Samphran and we were becoming part of a greater Bangkok zone. We were also now Bortle 6/7.
A solution of sorts presented itself. Chile. The Atacama Desert is home to some of the darkest skies in the world, there are facilities where you can lease space to install your equipment, and at 1600 meters altitude you have around 320 clear nights per year.
I began to send and install equipment at El Sauce, Obstech. It is a very well equipped hosting facility, with reliable power, fast internet and excellent technical support. By early 2019 the first telescope a RiDK 400 was operational and producing some very impressive images. Since then a RiDK 500, RiDK 700 (soon to be replaced by a CDK 700) and CDK 1000 have gone into service as well as a 350 mm wide field scope.
No system runs perfectly and there are always hiccups and fixes, but overall this array of instruments is producing some great data and I have a lot of fun operating the equipment.
I have been fortunate over time to have developed some reasonable image processing skills which has led to more enjoyment of what I am able to render in my images. The climb up that hill which is a climb that is never quite finished is a story in itself.
I hope that you enjoy the website and the images. I would like to thank my friend Gowri for a massive amount of assistance in setting this website up.
You can also find me at:
Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/masterdarksastro/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/throughlightandtime/
Mike Selby